Craig McInnes: Election timing undermines school peace plan

Craig McInnes, Vancouver Sun columnist01.25.2013

Premier Christy Clark’s 10-year plan for labour peace in public schools looks like an effort by the B.C. Liberals to cast NDP leader Adrian Dix in a spoiler role in the coming provincial election campaign.

Four months before an election, Premier Christy Clark unveiled a bargaining framework on Thursday she says can deliver 10 years of labour peace in B.C. schools.

As expected, the B.C. Teachers’ Federation dismissed the proposal out of hand, dashing any faint hope that it might allow us to, as Clark put it, “imagine the opportunities for students, parents and teachers in the classroom knowing classrooms would always be open.”

The government’s proposal was, as I suspect the government knew it would be, DOA.

On Friday, Mike McDonald, the B.C. Liberal campaign director, tweeted a more credible explanation for the real intention behind bringing in the bargaining framework now.

I don’t think you have to be fluent in Twitter-speak to understand how the Liberals hope to use the existence of the framework to cast Opposition leader Adrian Dix in a spoiler role, given the NDP’s ties to unions.

Sadly, we’ve heard this before. As I pointed out in an earlier column and my colleague Vaughn Palmer emphasized on Friday, this is the second time Clark has promised in a campaign to secure labour peace in the education system. When the Liberals formed the government in 2001, they kept a campaign promise to protect students by designating education as an essential service.

That legal manoeuvre proved to be less powerful than the BCTF’s conviction that its right to strike, if not God-given, is at least a moral entitlement that transcends any mortal law.

The well-documented failure of the earlier Liberal strategy was predictable, given the struggle that the labour movement went through to obtain collective bargaining rights, including the right to strike.

And it was just as predictable that even without the context of an election, any attempt by a government that fought unions so vigorously in the past, to seek an agreement to eliminate strikes would be viewed with at best suspicion and more likely outright hostility.

What’s even sadder than the cynical posturing around the proposal is that it is aimed at a problem that we have known about for decades but have been unable to solve.

As hockey fans know, labour negotiations are essentially a power struggle based on which side can endure the most pain. It’s a terrible system, not much better than the mutually assured destruction strategy that was behind American defence planning in the Cold War.

But no one seems to be able to come up with a better one.

In the past century, we’ve figured out how to put a man on the moon. We’ve pulled a sheep out of a test tube, created artificial hearts and put powerful computers onto key chains.

But we still negotiate labour contracts by trying to ascertain which party has more to lose.

While the Liberal proposal will be used as a potential wedge issue against Dix’s New Democrats, if the polls hold and they form the next government, it’s unlikely that labour negotiations will be any easier for the NDP than they have been for the Liberals.

Unions may support the NDP, but that support is a means to an end and the end is the best contract they can obtain for their members. At the bargaining table, they will part ways. If anything, the NDP may face more difficult negotiations because unions will have higher expectations and it will have no more money to play with.

So regardless of who wins the next election, we need a better way of achieving fair, affordable, agreements between the government and public sector unions, just as we need a better way to resolve labour disputes in the private sector.

There is some cause for hope. Before Clark unveiled the framework for a 10-year plan, as described Friday by The Sun’s education reporter Janet Steffenhagen, the BCTF already had a tentative agreement with the public school employers’ association to begin bargaining before the current contract expires.

That follows the unexpected success of negotiations under mediator Charles Jago last spring, who got the two sides to agree to a contract that allowed schools to open in September without disruptions.

All of which suggests that if there is going to be progress, it will be in tiny steps rather than any politically motivated 10-year plan.

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Craig McInnes: Election timing undermines school peace plan

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